FCC Waives Rules For Foreign Paramount Ownership
The situation is described as resolved: the FCC, under Brendan Carr, has waived its own rules so that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi may hold a larger stake in Paramount, and the paperwork is said to have closed the question. Beneath the description, two forces are in tension: a company’s need for money that does not flinch, and a country’s old insistence that foreign states should not own the microphones on its airwaves. The equilibrium between them is the actual state of affairs. The resolution is only what that equilibrium looks like to those who have not asked who holds the pen.
A waiver is not a repeal. A repeal says the rule was wrong. A waiver says the rule is right and you are the exception.
That difference is the whole story. Had the ownership limit been struck down, the Gulf investors would hold a right. Under a waiver they hold a permission, and a permission has a grantor. The contested point is what this grantor cares about. Carr’s Commission has been more visibly interested in what broadcasters say than in who owns them, so the appetite of the one who can revoke is for content, not capital structure. Consider what that does to an investor. Three governments buy deeper into a company whose licences sit beneath a regulator that treats coverage as its business. They believed they were buying influence. They have also bought exposure to a regulator’s mood.
The strongest defence deserves its due. The ownership rule is old. A larger stake is not the same as control. Paramount must be funded by someone, and the alternative to patient Gulf capital may be a weaker company or buyers who face less scrutiny. National security concerns, on this view, are better managed by conditions attached to a waiver than by a blunt statutory wall. All of that can be true and still miss the mechanism. A condition restrains the investor from steering the newsroom, and it also hands the regulator a standing reason to inspect. The security screen and the content pressure are the same instrument, and which one you are looking at depends on who is holding it that year.
This is the logos beneath the tension: the most efficient censor is not the one who orders but the one who might. The old rule was a wall, and a wall spared everyone the question of whom to please. The waiver replaces the wall with a doorman, and the doorman’s discretion is now the most valuable asset in the building.
Picture a producer at a Paramount news desk weighing a segment on Gulf politics. Nobody phones her. Nobody needs to. The call has already been imagined, from either of two directions, and the imagining does the work. The company now has two landlords for one room. The investors can withdraw their capital and the regulator can withdraw the waiver, and each landlord’s leverage doubles as the other’s insurance. A tenant in that room learns to read two forecasts before deciding whether to open a window. The satire nobody has to write is that a regulator worried about foreign influence over American media has answered the worry by acquiring some influence of its own over the foreigners.
The equilibrium is fragile in a specific way. It depends on the friendship between grantor and grantee, and it is dated by the words “during Carr’s tenure.” A successor Commission can read the same file with a different appetite. Washington and the Gulf capitals will not always want the same thing, whether the disagreement is over a war, an oil price, or an election. When they diverge, the stake stops being an investment and becomes a hostage: a foreign state’s asset inside a company licensed by a body that can make its life difficult. Nor does the leverage stay constant. The larger the stake, the more there is to threaten, and the balance tilts with every dollar that goes in.
Investors in that position seek insurance, and in politics insurance is called agreeableness. That is the direction the flux flows. The rule that was waived existed to keep a foreign hand off the editorial dial. The waiver keeps the hand off by teaching it to stay away, and the lesson is taught by a regulator who might also touch the dial.
In a Gulf capital, an adviser will file the waiver in a folder marked permanent. It bears a chairman’s signature, and chairmen are tenants too.